Categories are like tags, special links that group together similar things. When applied to annotation layers, (annotation layers describe a particular period of time in a Metavid stream with a start and endpoint), categories create collections of video.
One quality nearly every category shares is incompleteness — because there is so much content (over 3000 hours) and only a few of us tagging content, many categories are missing important content. As you watch speeches on Metavid, spending the extra 5 seconds to categorize them will make them easier to find in the future. If there’s a category you find interesting or appealing, feel free to expand it yourself. If you find a speech and there’s isn’t a category that makes sense for it — start a new one!
Check out this tutorial for more information about tagging clips. You can find a list of current media categories here.
Along with a few other exciting features; Open Congress is now syndicating Metavid video! This is on the heels of Govtrack’s recent addition of Metavid feeds as well. Open Congress integration includes full support for Bills and People pages along with YouTube syndication. You can see the full scope at open congress:
Videos from Metavid, the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, and the YouTube hubs for the House and Senate. Now, for every Senator, Representative, and major bill in Congress, OpenCongress shows you embedded video footage of relevant floor speeches, official announcements, and more. It’s video, it’s awesome.
An example bill page (that has had a lot of tagging activity) is the economic stimulus bill.
At present, the #1 most discussed political clip on YouTube is a very short 16 second clip of Chuck Schumer claiming Americans don’t care about pork barrel spending.
The neat thing about Metavid is that because we archive the full day of proceedings, we can take that same 16 second clip and expand coverage from either side and provide context to an otherwise self-encapsulated sound byte. Here we can see Chuck’s quote as part of a larger rhetorical flourish; he calls for the removal of the pork spending and highlights what he sees are the important elements of the bill. Here is the the clip on Metavid:
The ability to dig deeper and investigate a given argument that is being presented is fundamental to understanding what is really taking place. This is why a citation framework for web video is so important for healthy deliberation. This way, the context (and contextualization) of a given source document can be investigated. Tools like Metavid open up this citation process for continued dialog in contrast to allowing the clip fragment to act as the final word.
Engage Media has published a very detailed report on the state of Free and Open source software for online video. Titled: FOSS Codecs For Online Video: Usability Uptake and Development 1.2 the paper details many software application and tools for ~free~ online publishing of video. They even include a mention of mv_embed ;). Their recommendations for pushing for ogg theora in HTML5 and using FOSS whenever possible in Transmission members projects are positive directions for wider open source media wide adoption. check it out
Each close caption segment is a few sentences. When doing searches keep in mind that a sentence may break mid stream so exact phrase match may be missed in broken sentences. The metavid search process currently uses mysql FULLTEXT SEARCH in boolean mode. This means that you have a few parameters that you can control in doing search queries. For example if you search for “iraq war” that will match the exact phrase, or if you search for +iraq -war that will find only instances where iraq is mentioned and war is not mentioned. You can see the full documentation on boolean full text searches in mysqls documentation.
I have also updated the search page and front page to highlight popular queries that people have been making.
update: you can now also jump to any available day on the search page.
Metavid has started to put all the original mpeg2 captures onto archive.org. (Previously we were just removing them because of space considerations) But now when ever you pull up a recent stream you should now have access to the mpeg2 original. For example the senate proceeding for june 4th now links to its associative stream on archive.org. Archive.org also makes the stream available in other formats such as flash flv and mpeg4. To see a list of all the streams available on archive.org so far you can check the U.S congress category.
Watch this space for more interesting collaboration with archive.org in the future:)
In case you have not been following the metavid in use part of the wiki, I thought I would mention some of the usage of the metavid dataset & site here:
Click.TV has let us know about a prototype they have created for using their flash application with a enhanced version of the data set that metavid makes available. The flash video interface is very responsive and we aspire to such fluidity with open source video and should be getting there soon
GovTrack.us is syndication friendly system for tracking government representatives. They now link into metavids clips on their people pages (on the left hand side).
And finally bloggers are using some clips: findlaw and boogiechimpdigital have used the embed clip function to put a metavid clip right into their blog postings.
We use categories for a few different kinds of content. Some occur every day, like One Minute Speeches in the House. Others only occur once a year, like San Jacinto Day or Earth Day. Some will be limited to a particular debate, like Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, and others will be relevant to any topic such as Great Poster. There are small categories like Global Warming Skepticism and huge categories like Opening Prayer; serious ones, like Remembrances and light-hearted ones like Quiet Please.
Engage Media has published a very 
Metavid has started to put all the original mpeg2 captures onto 
